by The President's House: 1800 to the Present : The Secrets;History of the World's Most Famous Home
Angelica was a niece of Dolley Madison’s—it was Dolley, in fact, who had masterminded her match with Abraham Van Buren—but in at least one respect Angelica lacked her aunt’s political savvy. During her honeymoon in Europe, she picked up a somewhat dubious custom. Instead of standing in a receiving line, getting her pretty hand mashed, she posed on a platform at the south end of the Elliptical Saloon with flowers in her arms and hair. She wore a gorgeous white dress and surrounded herself with a half dozen women friends, also in glowing white.
The youthful Queen Victoria was posing thus in London. But this was democratic America and Angelica’s posing was greeted with cries of political outrage, mingled with sarcastic yawps. Angelica finally got the message and started shaking hands.
V
The proxy first lady who may have enjoyed the job most was Harriet Lane, the vivacious niece of bachelor president James Buchanan. Ignoring the storm clouds of the oncoming Civil War, twenty-seven-year-old Harriet made the Buchanan White House a lively place. Her hair was golden blond, her eyes violet, her mouth impish. Young men and not a few older ones swarmed from all directions to attend her parties.
During the Buchanan era, Washington was awash in southern hospitality and Harriet was determined to have the White House lead the way. She kept the place lively right up to the eve of the Civil War. In 1860, the last year of her reign, she presided at the great social event of James Buchanan’s administration, the reception of Queen Victoria’s handsome nineteen-year-old-son, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. Harriet planned a series of lavish social events, climaxed by a banquet on a coast guard cutter, appropriately named Harriet Lane.
The partygoers steamed down the Potomac to Mount Vernon, where Harriet and the great-grandson of George III paid a visit to George Washington’s tomb. Dinner was served on the return voyage with the Marine Band providing music for dancing.
Did the prince have a good time? Four decades later, he personally invited Harriet Lane Johnston to London to attend his coronation as King Edward VII.
VI
The last of the substitute first ladies, Rose Cleveland, proved that good looks were not a prerequisite for the job. Just under forty, Rose was the bachelor president’s youngest sister. She was as plain as a fence post and did not try to disguise it. Nor did she make any effort to disguise her intelligence. A teacher in her native Buffalo, as well as a staunch feminist, she believed that women should vote, hold jobs, and have opinions about everything, including politics. As the president’s hostess, she did not hesitate to make this clear to his guests.
At first, Washington’s reaction was negative. They were not used to women who were more interested in reading and writing than in the latest gossip. But gradually, among a select group, a different Rose emerged. Warm, often humorous, she established lifelong friendships with several members of Washington’s elite.
Miss Rose’s reign ended when the president married Frances Folsom in 1886 and his sister went back to teaching and writing. Thereafter womanpower in the White House became the exclusive property of first ladies.
VII
The most famous representative of womanpower in the White House seems at first glance in a class by herself. Eleanor Roosevelt towers above the historical landscape these days as a force for tolerance, brotherhood, and human rights. She spoke out for these and other causes in her time, but the stature she achieved after she left the White House interferes with an accurate assessment of her years as first lady. A close look reveals she was not as powerful or influential as we all want to remember her.
Perhaps the clearest proof of the limitations of a first lady’s womanpower is the story of Mrs. Roosevelt’s brief career as second in command of the Office of Civilian Defense at the beginning of World War II. The head of the agency, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York, was an old friend. But he and the first lady soon fell to quarreling because Mrs. Roosevelt had a bad habit of appealing to the president when she did not get her way.
FDR, who was trying to organize a major war, had no time for minor ones. He put the agency under the supervision of an aide, who said yes to everything Mrs. Roosevelt wanted to do. La Guardia resigned with a farewell blast at the first lady.
Next, Congress began scrutinizing the Office of Civilian Defense. They discovered that Eleanor had put a pair of old friends on the public payroll, neither of whom was doing much work. Someone pointed out that the two were getting the same pay as General Douglas MacArthur, who was ducking Japanese bullets in the Philippines. A firestorm of negative publicity broke out in the media. The friends resigned and a humiliated Eleanor Roosevelt soon followed suit.
VIII
Eleanor Roosevelt’s experience illuminates the very tricky problems first ladies face when they try to move beyond the White House to the public arena. Few if any first ladies worked harder than Rosalynn Carter. She toured the country, she whizzed abroad on goodwill missions, she presided at White House receptions, and somehow found time to learn Spanish. The New York Times called her “the most influential First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt.” But unlike nonpolitical first ladies, such as Pat Nixon and Mamie Eisenhower, Rosalynn never became the nation’s most admired woman in the public opinion polls.
It may have had something to do with the nickname the press fastened on her: “the steel magnolia.” It may have had even more to do with the way the voters view the first lady’s role: as simply being there. The American people apparently do not like a woman who has not been elected to office to start exercising political power. Running the White House, they seem to think, is more than enough responsibility.
IX
This mind-set became excruciatingly apparent when Hillary Rodham Clinton tackled the very public job of overhauling the nation’s health care system. From the start, the venture had problems. Many staffers felt health care might collide with an even more important priority, getting Congress to pass the president’s budget. This may have been the reason for a major blunder—the total failure to draw Congress into the loop early in the game.
It took the better part of a year to get the plan in shape for the president to introduce in a speech. Eventually, Hillary testified on its behalf before five congressional committees, and gave bravura performances. From there it was all downhill (no pun intended, I swear!).
Nobody really liked Mrs. Clinton’s health plan, not even her husband’s cabinet officers, but because she was the president’s wife, nobody wanted to criticize it either. Congressmen and senators heaped unctuous public praise on the first lady and deplored the plan behind the scenes. When the 1,342-page bill was finally sent to Congress, there were nine more months of argument that did little but unite the opposition. The bill was never even voted out of committee for consideration by the full Congress. All in all, it was a humiliating experience for both the first lady and her husband. From Maine to California, Hillary’s performance had people asking a tough but pertinent question: “Who elected her?”
X
Womanpower in the White House would seem to work best when it is subtle. It is interesting that Dolley Madison had the right idea two hundred years ago, and a modern woman like Hillary Clinton had to learn it the hard way.
From this vantage point, maybe the most influential first ladies are not the ones who do their politicking in public. My favorite example is someone I had the opportunity to watch in action from very close up—Bess Wallace Truman.
Coming into the White House in the wake of Eleanor Roosevelt, my mother made a decision not to even try to imitate Mrs. Roosevelt’s model of a first lady. Bess gave only one press conference—to announce she would not be holding any others. She never made a political statement if she could possibly avoid it. But behind the scenes, Bess Truman was as deeply involved in politics as any congressman or senator.
The president of the United States discussed his problems with her with a candor he would never dream of using with anyone else—and she didn’t just listen. She gave him her unvarnished advice. Not unt
il I saw Bess Wallace Truman in the perspective of womanpower in the White House did I begin to appreciate her accomplishment. From her point of view, the less people knew about her influence, the better. Her covert political status gave her the freedom of thought and speech she wanted.
A Washington newswoman recently wrote an estimate of Bess Truman and the other first ladies she knew in her fifty years of covering the White House. Bess, she concluded, had “rejected the role of first lady.” Citing one of Dad’s favorite sayings, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the reporter maintained that Bess Truman had adopted her own version of the saying, to wit: “If it’s too hot for me, I’ll get back to the kitchen.”
When I read that, I laughed out loud. If there was one room Bess Truman stayed out of, except in moments of dire necessity, it was the kitchen! Somewhere, I suspect, Mother was laughing, too. Without reporters or anyone else catching on, Bess Truman had White House womanpower down cold.
Questions for Discussion
Why were Thomas Jefferson’s attempts to discourage women’s interest in politics doomed to failure?
Besides holding office, how can women influence politics?
Should first ladies take an active role in public affairs?
Harry S Truman and his appointments secretary, Matt Connelly. Matt always knew who should, or should not, be admitted to the Oval Office. Credit: Harry S Truman Library
7
The West Wing
FROM THE START, people other than presidents and their families have played major roles in helping the chief executive run the country. During the twentieth century, the number of aides, advisers, directors, deputies, secretaries, and assorted other experts—collectively known as the White House staff—multiplied at an incredible rate. They now total some six thousand people working in over a hundred different offices. But the center of the power structure is still the West Wing.
The West Wing contains the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, a reception room—also known as the Appointments Lobby—and assorted meeting rooms and offices for secretaries and staff members who deal with the president on a day-today basis.
Proximity to presidential power gives a certain aura to anyone who works in, or has easy access to, the West Wing. Its denizens have become the subject of TV shows, movies, and novels. Tell-all books have portrayed them as glamorous, devious, and too clever for their own good. Most of these characterizations are pretty far from the mark. The best portrait of a West Wing staffer was drawn by an old pro, reporter Merriman Smith, who offered a no-holds-barred description of what these jobs entail:
WANTED: Mature man, educated, witty, politically smart, pleasant personality, unlimited loyalty, to serve as senior secretary. Must be willing to work 12–15 hours daily, including nights. No days off or vacations. But travel constantly. Be prepared to take much blame, public criticism, and ridicule. Should have patience capable of listening to thousands of complaints. Ability to say no absolutely necessary.
“Smitty,” as we Trumans called him, was only half kidding. When a new staffer went to work for Herbert Hoover, he asked a senior employee what the office hours were. “From seven A.M. until midnight, except the nights we work late,” the bleary-eyed veteran growled.
II
It seems hard to believe now but our early chief executives had no staffs worth mentioning. Most of them made do with a single secretary, often a relative or close friend. Thomas Jefferson’s man Friday, Meriwether Lewis, was not related to the president, but their families were old friends and Jefferson had taken an interest in the young man after his father’s death.
Lewis lived and worked in a pair of rooms that had been constructed at the south end of the unfurnished East Room. His job was a snap compared to later presidential secretaries. He had so little to do, he often went hunting in the nearby woods and fields and brought back rabbits and grouse for the White House table. He also took three years off to explore the Louisiana Territory. Jefferson’s relationship with Meriwether Lewis was warmer than many other presidents and their secretaries. Long hours and close quarters often made subordinates a target for executive irritability. James Buchanan’s nephew, James Buchanan “Buck” Henry, had to put up with barked orders and frequent tongue-lashings. The breaking point came when Buchanan rebuked him for growing a mustache. Buck quit and headed for New York. His replacement was another namesake nephew, James Buchanan II.
III
When Abraham Lincoln was nominated for president by the Republican Party in 1860, he invited a twenty-nine-year-old Illinois newspaperman, John George Nicolay, to be his secretary. Nine months later, with the southern states seceding and civil war looming, they prepared to leave Springfield for Washington, D.C. Foreseeing the immense workload ahead of him, Nicolay suggested engaging a twenty-three-year-old law student, John Hay, as his assistant.
The workload John George Nicolay had foreseen materialized all too soon. The day after the inauguration, he sat down to write a letter to his fiancée back in Illinois. After two sentences, the call bell in Lincoln’s office rang. Nicolay did not finish the letter until midnight two days later.
John George Nicolay and John Hay soon acquired the cachet that goes with working in the White House. Outraged public officials and other VIPs sputtered that the two young men were blocking access to the president and not delivering their letters. Nicolay and Hay, in turn, often gazed with less than friendly eyes on cabinet members and congressmen. On one occasion, Hay wryly remarked that rather than pay another visit to short-tempered Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, he would gladly “make a tour of a smallpox hospital.”
About Lincoln neither man had any doubts, no matter what anyone else said or thought about him—and he had plenty of critics in those days. Lincoln reciprocated their affection. The two men slept in a bedroom across the hall from their second-floor White House office. On more than one midnight, the chief executive appeared in their doorway in his nightshirt to read them a funny story from a newspaper or discuss a problem he had figured out how to solve when he should have been sleeping. When Lincoln’s son Willie died in early 1862, the president stumbled into Nicolay’s office about five P.M. and said: “My boy is gone—he is actually gone!” Bursting into tears, he retreated to his own office.
The White House was almost as unhealthy for Nicolay and Hay as it was for poor Willie. Hay compared summer odors from the swamps south of the mansion to “ten thousand dead cats.” When one of them was laid low, the other worked twice as hard. Nicolay and Hay’s contribution to the eventual victory of the Union was incalculable. Almost as important, they later wrote a ten-volume life of Lincoln that is a starting point for anyone who wants to understand his greatness.
IV
For all their dedication and intelligence, Nicolay and Hay were still very young men. They never achieved the status of presidential advisers. The first aide to rise to this level was Grover Cleveland’s secretary, Daniel Lamont.
This shrewd, genial man got to know Cleveland when he was hired to write his inaugural address as governor of New York. Cleveland took him to Washington after his election to the presidency and Lamont was soon the closest of companions. He swiftly became Cleveland’s political adviser as well as his man of all work. He was also extremely astute in his handling of the press.
Lamont got reporters on Cleveland’s side with a combination of charm and a steady diet of information. One veteran newsman of the era described his approach: “He let the ‘boys’ do most of the talking and guessing but never allowed them to leave the White House with a wrong impression, or without thinking they had got all there was in the story.”
By the time Cleveland returned to Washington for his second administration, he thought so highly of Daniel Lamont he appointed him secretary of war.
V
William Howard Taft was the first chief executive to work in the West Wing, setting up shop in the Oval Office that was built at his request. One of the most frequent visitors to the new office wa
s Major Archie Butt, who had been Teddy Roosevelt’s military aide and continued in the job for Taft. Butt adored Roosevelt and his family and at first was underwhelmed by Taft, but he gradually became devoted to him.
Two years before the end of his term as president, Roosevelt had chosen Taft, his secretary of war, as the best man to succeed him. As time went on, Roosevelt began cooling on Taft. Butt tried to bridge the gap between them. When Roosevelt returned from a postpresidential trip to Europe, Taft asked Butt to deliver a confidential letter, inviting Teddy to the White House for a frank talk. Roosevelt declined with a formal letter, in which he addressed Taft as “Dear Mr. President” instead of the usual “Dear Will.” The two men finally met while Taft was vacationing in Massachusetts. Butt, who joined them, reported that the conversation was strained and nothing was resolved.
Meanwhile, Archie Butt slowly but steadily shifted his allegiance to Taft. It was a stressful time for the major. As chief military aide, he was in charge of White House receptions and dinners, of which there were many. He was also William Howard Taft’s sounding board as the president brooded over his former friend’s threat to run him out of his job.
Finally came Teddy’s announcement that he would be a candidate for the Republican nomination in 1912—the break Butt had struggled in vain to prevent. The exhausted aide had scheduled a trip to Europe to visit a friend. Now he wondered if he should go.
“I really can’t bear to leave him just now,” he wrote to an aunt. “I can see he hates to see me go, and I feel like a quitter in going.”
The next morning, Butt canceled his reservations. When he told Taft, the president ordered him to reinstate them. A month’s rest would restore Butt to fighting trim, Taft assured him.